Don Pendleton - Radical Edge

“We’ve faced a few who answered to that description,” Grimaldi said.

“Yeah, and every time, they were wasting lives.”

They rode in silence. The thrum of the rotor blades vibrated Bolan’s chest. He let his hands work as if of their own accord; he could disassemble, clean and reassemble the familiar Beretta 93-R in the dark, on the back of a camel, in a sandstorm. The image made him chuckle despite his stern mood. The phrasing was Barbara Price’s, shared in a moment’s intimacy after the pair had spent some meaningful and only too rare downtime together. Their on-again, off-again relationship was the most Bolan could offer her. It was, for now at least, something she could accept. Neither pushed the other; they were professionals who knew only too well how quickly fates could turn.

He checked the fit and draw of his Beretta in the custom shoulder holster. The leather had been singed by muzzle-blast but wasn’t otherwise damaged. Replacing the machine pistol’s 20-round magazine, Bolan holstered the weapon, topped off the magazine in his Desert Eagle and secured the hand cannon in its Kydex scabbard.

“Jack,” he said. “Time.”

“Sixty seconds, Sarge.”

Good.

It was time to get back to work.

CHAPTER THREE

Bolan moved briskly through the rear lots of the string of well-tended ranch houses, his boots crunching on gravel and through scrub. There were no manicured green lawns to be found here. Such suburban affectations weren’t practical in this climate. The houses were nonetheless nicely maintained. Some yards were strewed with toys and dotted with play equipment—a sobering reminder that innocents weren’t far removed from the target area.

The hovering helicopter would, of course, have exposed their operation immediately. Grimaldi had been forced to put Bolan down far enough away from the second safe house to prevent the presence of the Pave Hawk from blowing the surprise. While he hadn’t yet seen anyone on the street—the neighborhood was, thankfully, a quiet one—he was certain he had been noticed through windows he passed. He was making no effort to conceal himself, no pretense of being a civilian. The sight of a black-clad man armed for combat and carrying an assault weapon was sure to have the residents dialing 911.

The fallout from that would be managed by Barb Price’s blacksuit liaisons, trusted field operatives and veteran commandos in their own right, who would be running interference for Bolan as they helped the Farm coordinate the thorny issues of jurisdiction and authority. It was just those issues that would have Brognola’s phone ringing before too long, as the many agencies with dogs in the fight started arguing with Justice about just who should be able to tell whom what to do.

Bolan answered to himself first.

The ergonomic and futuristic P90 in his hands was fully loaded. He had semiautomatic and fully automatic modes of fire at his disposal. The two-stage trigger, tuned by Kissinger and similar to that of the Steyr AUG, provided him with crisp fire control from which he could milk single shots or withering, sustained automatic fire.

“Sarge.” Grimaldi’s voice was clear in Bolan’s earbud. “Something strange is going on. I’m getting telemetry from Barb. She says emergency services are being rerouted to your location.”

“Rerouted?” Bolan asked. “What do you mean?”

“Something about a massive false alarm across town,” Grimaldi said. “Multiple mobile phone calls about a fire and hostage situation. Barb says it’s sketchy, but they’re getting confirmation in now. A block of vacant commercial properties was set ablaze, but there are no hostages. Alamogordo SWAT is reporting negative contact. You thinking what I’m thinking?”

“Decoy,” Bolan said. “It’s a decoy play.”

“Barb says they’re tracking back to multiple 911 calls reporting gunfire in your target zone,” Grimaldi said. “Stuff that took a backseat to what they thought was a terrorist incident in the other direction. Sounds awfully convenient. Sarge, I think we may have missed the party.”

Bolan picked up the pace, jogging now, the FN P90 in his grip as he moved. He didn’t like the sound of that, not at all. A decoy might mean some kind of sacrifice-and-breakout maneuver on the part of Hyde’s men, perhaps to cover the terrorist leader’s withdrawal. There were countless ways the Twelfth Reich cell might have been tipped off to the threat. He couldn’t guess at them. He could only hurry.

As he neared the safe house, he saw smoke. A small fire seemed to be burning at the back of the structure. Neighbors were already coming out of their homes, pointing and crouching, afraid to stand in the open but too curious or worried not to look. When they saw Bolan, some shrank back. One woman screamed. Another man shouted that there was some kind of trouble, pegging Bolan as someone in authority. The soldier could only keep running. He was now closing on the safe house.

The house was, like the others around it, a low ranch. This one had started out a muddy tan, then bleached an uneven beige by the merciless New Mexico sun.

There was a dead man on the porch.

The butt of the stubby FN P90 was already positioned against Bolan’s body; he snapped the weapon up to acquire the sights. The man on the porch was down, lifeless, his limbs turned at angles no living human being could endure. He wasn’t the threat. Whoever had put him there was.

“Hey! What’s happening?” a young man, just a teenager, called from the neighboring house.

“Go back inside!” Bolan warned. “Justice Department!” The kid slammed the door as if monsters were barking up his walk.

Bolan hit the porch in a combat crouch. His boots scattered brass shell casings, which were thick on the porch floor. The front of the house had been shot to pieces, peppered with so many bullet holes that it looked like Bonnie and Clyde’s last ride. He couldn’t tell, from this vantage, exactly what was producing the black smoke curling from the rear of the building.

He struck the door with a powerful front kick, near the knob, not bothering to try it. Molding flew in three directions as the flimsy, hollow-core door slammed against the interior wall. Bolan ignored that; he was already charging inside, ready to flood the room with 5.7 mm rounds.

The living room was a slaughterhouse.

A smoke alarm was squealing. The fire from the rear of the house was gaining momentum; its crackling was growing louder. Smoke drifted in lazy clouds through the L-shaped living area, escaping through bullet holes spidering the bay window at the front of the home. The plaster walls were pocked with similar holes and sprayed with blood. More blood soaked every visible piece of furniture. There was a dead woman on the couch, two dead men on the floor near a card table and a pair of reclining chairs, and another dead man near a very old and very shattered tube television. The man near the television had almost no head. He had taken what was likely a shotgun blast at close range.

Shells were thicker here than they had been on the porch. Bolan crouched and, using a metal pen he carried in his web gear, fished up first one, then another. He checked half a dozen casings throughout the living room. All were .40 caliber. He pocketed several, careful not to touch them.

Crouched low, he moved from body to body, making sure. There were no signs of life. The house was a tomb. It was worse than that, however.

The dead hadn’t merely been neutralized; they had been mutilated, shot again and again in what could only have been postmortem overkill. Bolan filed that fact for analysis even as his mind worked overtime to make sense of what he was seeing.

Had the skinhead safe house been hit by a rival gang? A conflicting security firm? Counterterrorists, perhaps operating without authority on American soil? The first was possible; the second was unlikely, given the Farm’s contacts and Brognola’s knowledge of domestic security operations. The third was possible but didn’t seem to fit. Bolan had only too recently found himself caught between rival security and black-ops personnel from multiple countries, in playing bodyguard and escort to a Very Important Person whom he had to transport to Wonderland. Even at their most vicious, foreign kill teams wouldn’t have wasted the time and firepower necessary to do this kind of job on poorly trained skinhead combatants. An ops team from a nominally allied nation, like Israel, certainly wouldn’t kill so unprofessionally.